Departure from Seattle
Oh wow, so much to say and yet not energy to type it…
I’ve been meaning to blog along my trip but unfortunately my internet connectivity has been limited so far, so it may take some time for me to catch up. I at least want to start with my departure from Seattle. I was flying business class (courtesy of Microsoft), which meant I was allowed to enter the airline’s airport lounge. I had never been privileged enough to enter one of these before but damn was it nice; free food and drinks. The interesting part was that if you wanted a beer or cocktail, you had to make it yourself. They had the drafts there which you could walk up to a top off your pint, or even the vodka, rum, and whiskey bottles in case you cared to make a mixed drink. It was kind of neat!
Anyways once on the plane, it was a direct flight to Amsterdam; damn was that a long flight! Anyways, the person sitting immediately next to me worked for Microsoft and was quite familiar with my friend Peter, but more oddly enough the person two seats over was Nk, a Director in my own organization! So here I am being offered glass after glass of champagne more or less directly in sight of upper-management, it was odd but I didn’t care, in fact all I can say is DAMN that champagne was GOOD.
For those of you who know me well know that I’m quite an anxious flyer. It doesn’t mean that I freak out (at least noticeably), but let’s just say I’m not completely comfortable throughout the flight. I’m amazed at how well I did on this flight, I wasn’t uneasy at all and in fact I was able to get a couple hours of shut-eye while on the plane (I’m sure the booze helped a little). Hopefully this lasts through out the trip as I have many more flights to take in the coming weeks!
So I landed in Amsterdam safely, said my goodbyes to Nk and headed on my way. At this point in time I was officially on vacation! The bollocks of it all is that given my next flight was with another carrier I had to go though immigration, claim my baggage, check-in with the new airline, and go through airport security twice (once for the terminal and once for my gate). I did all that and I still had a couple hours to spare before my next flight. This is where I found a flaw in regards to the airport, there is no place to sit back and relax! You would figure you could do so at the gate, but no… There are several other flights at that gate ahead of mine and you’re not allowed to being the vicinity unless you’re on those flights. So here I am looking for a place to relax (keep in mind it’s 1:00am Seattle time) and I was having no luck, let’s just say I was one cranky motherfucker. Anyways, I finally made it on the plane although I wasn’t the most confident in the airplanes performance. It didn’t seem to phase me much, I was so fucking tired I was wanted to get to my destination and frankly if that couldn’t happen expediently I could care less is plane ditched in the sea; we made it though. I had some eye-candy to look at (one of the flight attendant’s was HOT) which chilled me out a little bit.
